Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless communications, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for performing a sidelink transmission based on a contention based scheduling request (CB-SR) in a wireless communication system.
Related Art
3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) long-term evolution (LTE) is a technology for enabling high-speed packet communications. Many schemes have been proposed for the LTE objective including those that aim to reduce user and provider costs, improve service quality, and expand and improve coverage and system capacity. The 3GPP LTE requires reduced cost per bit, increased service availability, flexible use of a frequency band, a simple structure, an open interface, and adequate power consumption of a terminal as an upper-level requirement.
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in supporting proximity-based services (ProSe). Proximity is determined (“a user equipment (UE) is in proximity of another UE”) when given proximity criteria are fulfilled. This new interest is motivated by several factors driven largely by social networking applications, and the crushing data demands on cellular spectrum, much of which is localized traffic, and the under-utilization of uplink frequency bands. 3GPP is targeting the availability of ProSe in LTE rel-12 to enable LTE become a competitive broadband communication technology for public safety networks, used by first responders. Due to the legacy issues and budget constraints, current public safety networks are still mainly based on obsolete 2G technologies while commercial networks are rapidly migrating to LTE. This evolution gap and the desire for enhanced services have led to global attempts to upgrade existing public safety networks. Compared to commercial networks, public safety networks have much more stringent service requirements (e.g., reliability and security) and also require direct communication, especially when cellular coverage fails or is not available. This essential direct mode feature is currently missing in LTE.
Packet data latency is one of the performance metrics that vendors, operators and also end-users (via speed test applications) regularly measure. Latency measurements are done in all phases of a radio access network system lifetime, when verifying a new software release or system component, when deploying a system and when the system is in commercial operation. Better latency than previous generations of 3GPP radio access technologies (RATs) was one performance metric that guided the design of LTE. LTE is also now recognized by the end-users to be a system that provides faster access to internet and lower data latencies than previous generations of mobile radio technologies. In the 3GPP, much effort has been put into increasing data rates from the first release of LTE (Rel-8) until the most recent one (Rel-12). However, with regard to further improvements specifically targeting the delays in the system little has been done.
Packet data latency is important not only for the perceived responsiveness of the system, but it is also a parameter that indirectly influences the throughput. In addition, to achieve really high bit rates, UE L2 buffers need to be dimensioned correspondingly. The longer the round trip time (RTT) is, the bigger the buffers need to be. The only way to reduce buffering requirements in the UE and eNB side is to reduce latency. Further, radio resource efficiency could also be positively impacted by latency reductions. Lower packet data latency could increase the number of transmission attempts possible within a certain delay bound, hence higher block error rate (BLER) targets could be used for the data transmissions, freeing up radio resources but still keeping the same level of robustness for users in poor radio conditions. The increased number of possible transmissions within a certain delay bound, could also translate into more robust transmissions of real-time data streams (e.g. voice over LTE (VoLTE)), if keeping the same BLER target. This may improve the VoLTE voice system capacity.
Various pre-scheduling strategies can be used to lower the latency to some extent, but similarly to shorter scheduling request (SR) interval introduced in Rel-9, they do not necessarily address all efficiency aspects. Accordingly, various techniques to reduce latency, e.g. reduced transmission time (TTI) and processing time, contention based physical uplink shared channel (CB-PUSCH) transmission, etc., have been discussed.